The daughter of the late Walter Sisulu (a hero of the South African struggle), Sisulu obtained a BA degree and Diploma in Education and a BA Hons, History, both from the University of Swaziland. She obtained an MA in History, Centre for Southern African Studies and an M Phil, Centre for Southern African Studies both from the University of York.

She was awarded the Human Rights Centre Fellowship in Geneva (1992). Her project for the UN Centre resulted in University of the Witwatersrand School of Business setting up a training course to upgrade the policing skill of MK members. She has authored several publications on South African women in the liberation struggle or in various work sectors.

The Minister and the Ministry have been in the news since she took over the post in May 2004. Lindiwe Sisulu is on a mission to sell a vision of people-friendly towns and cities that will become socially integrated engines of growth. “The success of this programme requires that everybody buys into it,” she said in an interview. Sisulu is promoting a 10-year plan to eradicate the squatter camps that are home to 2.4 million families and to create what the government has dubbed sustainable human settlements.

She wants to stop building dormitories far away from the places where people work and play, and to start building non-racial communities: “It’s not about building shacks right next to multimillion-rand developments and it is not about expropriating property.” But it is about bringing the poor, who can least afford to live far out of town, closer to the heart of the city and often into it. Her aim is to provide every community with a minimum number of facilities including police stations, clinics, schools, parks and recreation halls and will be sited as near to jobs as possible.

These aims and sentiments are shared by the organisers of this congress and are embedded in the themes and programme of the congress.

Professor CHRISTOPHER ALEXANDER
Centre for Environmental Structure
Berkley
USA

Christopher Alexander was born in Vienna, Austria, and raised in Oxford and Chichester, England. He graduated from Cambridge University, where he studied Mathematics and Architecture. He then obtained a Ph. D. in Architecture at Harvard University. For his Ph. D. Thesis, later published as the book Notes on the Synthesis of Form, he was awarded the first Gold Medal for Research by the American Institute of Architects. Since 1963 he has been Professor of Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley, and Director of the Centre for Environmental Structure. In 1980, Professor Alexander was elected member of the Swedish Royal Academy; and in 1996 he was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Christopher Alexander is a Trustee of the Prince of Wales's Institute of Architecture.

Dr. Alexander is the author of many books and papers. He has initiated a new approach to architectural thinking, in which the same set of laws determines the structure of a city; a building; or a single room. He has spent most of his life in searching for these laws. His approach to solving this universal problem takes advantage of scientific reasoning, and totally opposes other, unscientific approaches based on fashion, ideology, or arbitrary personal preferences.

Christopher Alexander is sponsored by the Tshwane Univerisyt of Technology TUT

Professor NABEEL HAMDI
Director, Housing and Urban Development
Founder of the MSC in Development Practice
Centre for Development and Emergency Practice (CENDEP)
Oxford Brookes University

A well-known figure internationally regarding housing issues, Hamdi is the Co-Director of CENDEP. He is architect to the award-winning, community-based PSSHAK projects in London in the 1970’s. He is also principle investigator on sponsored research into low-income housing in the UK, USA and in numerous developing countries.

Hamdi has worked as consultant to governments, development agencies and banks internationally. He is published widely and is probably best known by his book: Housing Without Houses published in 1991. He was the winner of UN Habitat’s Scroll of Honour in 1997 for his outstanding contribution to community action planning in cities as well as the winner of the Queens Anniversary prize 2001, awarded to CENDEP for its MSc in Development Practice.

He was associate professor of housing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1981 - 1990, where he was awarded a Ford International Career Development professorship. His latest book, Small Change, about the art of practice and the limits of planning in cities, has just been published by Earthscan.

This paper will first review current thinking with respect to the provision of housing for the poor majority of urban dwellers, and the changing purpose of design. It will argue that design in housing is both a practical and a strategic activity - a process whose purpose is not only artistic and scientific, but profoundly social and political as well. It will present design to be a process of enablement which cultivates an environment for people and collectives to grow their own houses and communities - whose aim is to provide a shared context of meaning and purpose, to trigger novelty and make things happen, as much as it is to solve problems.

The paper will go on to illustrate principles important to this ideal with case examples, and importantly the relationship between designed structures and " emergent " ones.

In conclusion, the paper will discuss the demands this places on practice, arguing that it changes profoundly the nature of the housing professional and the order of the design and planning process itself.

Architectural Profession SACAP are sponsoring Nabeel Hamdi

Professor DAVID DEWAR
City and Regional Planning
School of Architecture and Planning
University of Cape Town
Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment

Dewar is author or co-author of 11 books and over 200 monographs and articles on issues relating to urban and regional development and planning. He also consults widely in Southern African on these issues and his work has won many awards. In 1996 he was made a Life Fellow of the University and in 1999-2000 he served as a member, and chair of one of the three working groups, of the National Development and Planning Commission, which inter alia, produced a Green Paper on a desired future planning system for South Africa.

MICHAEL MAJALE
Barch (Architecture, University of Nairobi), MA (Urban and Regional Planning, University of Nairobi), PhD (University of Newcastle Upon Tyne)
Lecturer in overseas development
Global Urban Research Unit (GURU)
School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape
University of Newcastle
Newcastle Upon Tyne

Michael Majale joined GURU from the Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG), an international non-governmental organisation, where her worked first as Programme Architect-Planner in the Eastern Africa regional office in Kenya and then lately as an International Projects Manager in the UK office. Prior to these he worked as a Research Fellow in the Housing and Building Research Institute (HABRI) of the University of Nairobi.

His research interests focus on improving the living conditions and livelihoods of urban poor living in informal settlements in the South. He has authored and co-authored many publications and participated in many conferences that may be found on the GURU website.

SHIGERU BAN
Shigeru Ban Architects
Tokyo, Japan

Japanese architect Shigeru Ban has built homes, pavilions and churches, some of them permanent, using little more than cardboard tubes. He wants beauty to be attainable by the masses, even the poorest. Ban first began to use the tubes in the '80s, in exhibitions. He was impressed by the material's load-bearing capacity (he calls cardboard "improved wood").
Although he has practiced primarily in Japan, where lightweight construction is embraced in traditional Japanese architecture, Ban has also used his designs to great effect in other countries. He employed leftover cardboard tubes—originally intended for casting concrete columns—to build temporary "log cabins" for refugees of the 1995 Rwandan crisis and victims of the Kobe earthquake. Each "cabin" cost less than $2,000. In Kobe, he used donated 34-ply tubes to build a community hall and houses. In 1998-99 he also designed refugee housing in Turkey.

Ban studied at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and New York's Cooper Union School of Architecture. He was apprenticed in the studios of Arata Isozaki from 1982-83 and in 1985 he opened his own studios in Tokyo. He teaches in a number of universities: Tama University (1993-1995), Yokohama National University and Nihon University. In 1996 he was awarded the Kansai Architect Grand Prize and the first prize in the Mainichi Advertisement Design Competition.

In 2000 he participated in the Venice Biennial with displays of paper homes. His research into the use of economic materials, especially card and bamboo still continues in the projects he is at work on today: card and steel for a small museum in Dijon, card for four homes in Portugal and bamboo for a number of Beijing residences.

TED BAUMANN
Cape Town, South Africa

Ted Baumann is a South African political economist and development activist based in Cape Town. His career started in industrial policy, working with the Congress of South African Trade Unions in the early 90s to develop strategies for employment-intensive development after apartheid. In 1993-4 he worked in Washington DC as a research officer for one of the biggest AFL-CIO unions, as well as for the World Bank as a consultant statistician. From 1994-97 he was Managing Director of Utshani Fund, a national housing microfinance facility for the South African Homeless Peoples' Federation (www.dialogue.org.za). After turning to consulting in 1998, he worked for a variety of clients including the United Nations Development Programme, International Labour Organisation, several South African government departments, and dozens of bilateral and multilateral funders, mainly on programme design and evaluation related to microfinance, housing, and poverty relief.

Ted is now director of Bay Research & Consultancy Services (www.brcs.co.za), offering services on microfinance, housing, and development policy. Through BRCS Ted has worked extensively in African microfinance issues, concentrating on Eastern and Southern Africa. He has worked directly with institutions in Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Namibia, and indirectly with many more. BRCS's main projects at present are:

• Coordination of the Community Microfinance Network (www.cmfnet.org.za), a facility for learning, advocacy and research for developmental microcredit institutions in Southern Africa. The CMN includes all of the developmental microfinance institutions in South Africa.
• Seconding Ted as Executive Director of Utshani Fund. Utshani Fund is revolving fund for human settlement development owned by the South African Homeless Peoples' Federation.